Built on Facts

For the last few hundred years, one of the most fundamental principles in physics has been that energy is conserved. You simply can’t get it from nowhere. Every experimentally tested physical theory from Newton’s laws to Maxwell’s equations and beyond is completely consistent with energy conservation. Noether’s theorem makes the possibility of an error in our understanding of energy conservation even more unlikely.

None of this has deterred people from trying to invent perpetual motion or other free energy / “over unity” devices. “What if the scientists are wrong? They’ve been wrong before. They should at least give serious examination and consideration to my idea.” say the hopeful inventors. I can understand their perspective. It’s frustrating and offputting to be met with an eye-roll and a “You’re wrong” with no friendliness or consideration. It’s also frustrating and offputting for the scientists to keep being approached by people who are wrong (and often belligerent), and the cycle feeds on itself. Even worse are the outright fraudulent companies preying on unfortunate investors, and the media which is often so spectacularly ignorant that you can’t tell if they’ve been fooled by fraud or just screwed up a real research story so badly that it seems to be claiming something it’s not. Swans on Tea recently noted an instance of one of these, though it’s hard to tell which one.

To avoid this, I have a suggestion for those people who are trying to build a free energy machine and want to be taken seriously. There’s two issues to resolve. You have to make sure you’re not fooling yourself about what your device can do, and you have to make sure that it’s easy for a scientist to see that the device can do what you say. Here therefore is the Built on Facts Protocol for testing perpetual motion or free energy. It is a literal instantiation of a black box test.

1. Put the machine in a completely closed box. Metal and airtight is preferred, but not required. Absolutely nothing can be connecting the outside of the box to the inside of the box under any circumstances.
2. Attach a standard light bulb socket to the outside of the box, with the wiring running into the inside of the box to the power output of your free energy machine. If your device does not produce 120VAC at 60Hz, attach a small generator, inverter, or whatever else is required to provide the appropriate power. If this is too onerous in terms of total wattage, a small 12V bulb or even a LED is acceptable. Try to use as high an output power as possible, as the difficulty of step 3 is inversely proportional to the power output. When your device is running, the bulb must remain unambiguously lit.
3. The device must run and the light must shine continuously for the amount of time T in seconds given below without outside intervention of any kind.

T = (34,600,000,000)(V/P)

Where V is the volume of the box in cubic meters and P is the power of the bulb in watts. So if your bulb is a 120W light and the box is 1 cubic meter, you’ll need the device to power the bulb for 9 years. Now most people don’t have 9 years to wait. You can take this figure down quite a bit by ramping up the power and shrinking the size of the box. If you can fit your invention into one cubic foot and power a 1000W halogen you’ll only have to operate for about 11 days. I understand this is quite a difficult requirement but there is a concrete reason for it. It could be worse - perpetual means forever, after all.

What is the reason? Why 34,600,000,000 for the constant? That’s the energy density of gasoline in joules per cubic meter. The box ensures that you’re probably not inadvertently connecting to some outside source of energy. The large time constant ensures that you’re probably not using some internal energy storage. If you can run for the required time with no contact or input from the outside, you pass the test and the device is worth a more careful examination by a qualified scientist.

Best of luck.